Dec 10, 2003—Axcess, a Dallas-area company that offers security and asset-tracking systems, has won CE (Conformité Européenne) approval for the bulk of its radio frequency identification (RFID) offerings, allowing the company to expand sales into the European market.

Allan Griebenow

“Our systems integrator partners can now sell all our RFID systems in Europe and some other countries,” says Allan Griebenow, president and CEO at Axcess, which has already seen its systems deployed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

CE is a European certification that indicates conformity with the essential health and safety requirements agreed upon by the European Parliament. For RFID products, that primarily means meeting radio frequency emission standards. Having won clearance after about a month’s testing by one of the EU-recognized organizations responsible for carrying out conformity assessment, most Axcess products can now be used throughout the 18 countries of the European Economic Area (EEA), as well as in Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein.

According to Axcess, the decision to seek CE certification came at the request of one of its largest system integrator partners. “As a start-up we have plenty of opportunity to grow in the U.S. market, but global systems integrators need to have global offerings and we decided to support that,” says Griebenow.

Axcess counts Tyco Fire and Security, Honeywell Aerospace Electronic Systems and Honeywell Home and Building Controls among its systems integrator partners, and both partners have included Axcess products in their own offerings.

Axcess systems combine RFID tagging with video monitoring to deliver secure access systems that can automatically detect intruders as well as automatically monitor and protects assets. The company’s system automatically links RFID activity—such as an RFID tag passing a reader located at an entry point—to surveillance video clips so that video material can be searched and viewed to give insight into RFID events. While Axcess systems have traditionally been used to track and control access to car parking lots and buildings, the company says companies are increasingly interested in its systems to prevent laptop theft from offices. “Companies are becoming increasingly aware of the threat of laptop theft and that the intellectual property that is lost when a laptop is stolen far outweighs the cost of the hardware lost,” says Griebenow.

With that enterprise market in mind, Axcess has also released an enterprise version of its key OnlineSupervisor Physical Asset Protection Software. OnlineSupervisor provides tracking and monitoring of personnel, vehicles and physical assets, enabling automatic alerts for unauthorised activity at an organisation’s location. The product has previously been available for system integration partners to sell as an ASP service residing on their own managed network servers. “The new version will now enable them to now offer their customers a turnkey enterprise product,” says Griebenow.